A view from North of Smokey

Say you’re from Halifax, and you’re outside a legion ceilidh in Ingonish, Cape Breton. Half the Island’s inside. Stepping out for a breather, a dulcet-voiced stranger, the emcee, invites you in. You don’t know a soul. But before disappearing backstage buddy introduces you to almost everyone, his parents, cousins and siblings.

Above the fiddles and stomping feet you barely catch their names; it’s hard to figure out who’s who. They couldn’t care less who your father was, you’re not from here — but it helps that you’ve got a cousin in Sydney. Pretty soon you’re up dancing, bugger the steps.

The stories start, so you’re saved, Mr. Emcee elbowing in to make sure you’re not completely lost. Actually, you’re lost as heck. But it’s OK, it’s good. Every rant, roar, tall tale, lament and by the jeez b’y cat’lick joke is being pulled out to entertain you. If you don’t like it, you can kiss buddy’s arse and find the door.

Nothing’s sacred, the Irish Catholic humour as black as it gets — the only place blacker is outdoors. And if you thought you’d sneak away early, forget it. These people have become like your relatives, salt of the earth, tough, kind and pee-your-

Depends funny. You have to love them; the emcee does. You mightn’t belong, but his mom — the sprightly, wicked-tongued senior who raised him and seven or eight other kids without much help from their hard-drinking dad — treats you like clan. Too soon the lights come on. The last ones to leave have to kick you out.

This sums up what it’s like reading poet Stewart Donovan’s new book, Wake of the Aspy: A Novel of Northern Cape Breton, the latest work by the St. Thomas University professor and native son of Ingonish. Caper culture doesn’t get more down home, or Down North, though calling this a novel defies convention. A collection of tales and anecdotes told in 12 loosely linked chapters, it’s like a dance floor packed with characters weaving in and out. Each has a snippet of fact or fancy to share, bits of liquored-up tales and sober memories. The amazing thing is that these all add up, rather brilliantly, to form a moving portrait of the Doyle clan (Donovan’s?) and the community, in a book that’s hard to put down.

Donovan’s depiction of this remote, idyllic place couldn’t be more vivid, or his characters more real. In fact, most seem too real to be invented. Sometimes they get cacophonous — a Caper version of Joyce’s The Dead? — and the aloof, mysterious narrator, Steve Doyle, appears briefly to moderate, pitting global struggles and conflicts against his family’s and the community’s. His reflections feel academic, but this shifting from big to small, from inside to outside, gives each more perspective.

Still tiny, relatively isolated and idyllic, Ingonish is all the more so during “Steve’s” coming of age in the 1960s, not to mention when his ancestors first arrive.

But idyllic has an edge; fishermen drown and mothers die having too many babies. Surviving by the seat of your pants sums up the old ways, the only escape via the Aspy, the coastal steamer that once linked the area to North Sydney and trains west. It took people away, but also returned them, enabling a stubborn clannishness. In its wake came modernity’s incursions, often mixed blessings: with electricity, TV; with the expropriation of homesteads for the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, jobs and Yankee tourists.

Survivalist humour helps Donovan’s Doyles take the good with the bad, and vice versa. What makes the writing — and its myriad voices — so bitterly funny is its honesty, that things can turn on a dime in absurd, brutal ways. It’s a lesson Steve and his cohorts learn early, driven home by The Bugs Bunny Show, never mind what’s taught in church. One of the funniest bits has his friend Angus parsing the show while the pair serve as altar boys, Angus whispering between the priest’s refrains:

“— Gaudet Mater Ecclesia.

— (I hate that f---in’ Roadrunner.)

— Mother Church rejoices.

— (I wish he’d catch the bastard, just once.)”

The only defense is to laugh. Because nothing is black and white, and what makes Donovan’s work poignant is his poet’s gift for minutiae, capturing the lights and darks that let gutted fish gleam, and conjuring people and experiences in a few words — Steve’s schooling by “pink and green Hilroy scribblers,” and his mother by her “cinnamon and Javex” smells.

If Wake of the Aspy is an elegy for a lost community, more specifically it’s an elegy for Laura Doyle, nee MacKinnon, from Meat Cove by way of Sydney Mines, the woman at the heart of Steve’s narrative. A blend of resilience, frailty, cockiness and kindness, Laura is the glue that holds this echoey oral saga together; a more tangible character you’re not likely to find anywhere. And once you get used to the clamor, quit fretting over who’s talking to whom, the last thing on your mind is pegging the book. You wish it didn’t have to end, or Laura have to die. But all things pass. It’s been quite the time, after all. Still, you have to wonder about that Steve — the emcee shutting the lights off? — no less a stranger than at the start. He seems like a bit of an outsider himself. But he’s got this great voice.